Dorothy Tse's City Like Water, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, ranks among the most anticipated works of translated fiction in 2026, offering English-language readers a surreal, water-logged vision from one of Hong Kong's most inventive writers.
Tse has built a reputation for fiction that bends reality, using dreamlike distortion to probe political and social pressures that are difficult to address head-on. City Like Water extends that project, immersing readers in a landscape where the boundaries between the real and the fantastical dissolve as readily as the city's flooded streets.
Surrealism with a purpose
Tse's imaginative strategies are never merely decorative. In her hands, the surreal becomes a way to render the disorientation of life in a place undergoing profound change. The flooded, shifting city of the title functions as both setting and metaphor, a world in which stability is an illusion and transformation is constant.
A translator's craft
Natascha Bruce, an acclaimed translator of Chinese-language fiction, carries Tse's slippery imagery and tonal shifts into English. The collaboration highlights how much translated literature depends on translators attuned to a writer's peculiar music, especially when that music depends on ambiguity.
- Author: Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse
- Translator: Natascha Bruce, from the Chinese
- Mode: surreal, dreamlike literary fiction
- Status: among 2026's most anticipated translations
Widening the map of world fiction
City Like Water arrives amid a broader push to bring more Sinophone literature to English readers, part of a movement that prizes voices historically underrepresented on international lists. Tse's distinctive style makes her an ideal ambassador for that effort, offering something unlike the realist fiction that often dominates translation catalogs.
Why readers should take notice
For those willing to embrace ambiguity, Tse rewards with prose that lingers and unsettles. Her work asks readers to surrender the expectation of tidy resolution and instead inhabit a mood, a texture, a city that behaves like a living, shifting thing.
As translated fiction continues to command growing attention, City Like Water stands out as a book that expands the sense of what the novel can do. It confirms Dorothy Tse as a singular voice, and it makes a strong case that some of the most daring fiction being written today is emerging from Hong Kong and reaching readers through the patient art of translation.
Fantasy as a form of truth
Tse belongs to a tradition of writers who reach for the fantastical precisely when realism feels inadequate to their circumstances. In a city whose recent history has been marked by upheaval and uncertainty, the surreal becomes a way of speaking honestly without speaking plainly. City Like Water invites readers to sit with that indirection, to accept that a flooded, dreamlike metropolis may capture a lived reality more faithfully than documentary prose ever could. For English-language readers newly attentive to Sinophone literature, the novel offers both an introduction to a major talent and a challenge to expand what they expect a work of fiction to be.